The fish was a fried fish from the chippy called the Hut on Liverpool Road into which my good friend, a Scot, by the name of Steven Lindsay, has in a spirit of civilising progressiveness encouraged the sale of the battered sausage. It’s ‘a belter, a Glasgow delicacy,’ as he describes.

The crow was noble in its devilish darkness, its head swivelling from side to side each time laying a black eye upon me and my haddock. It looked healthy as hell too, with a sheen on its feathers as rich as a polished jackboot. As Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential says, when birds look at you like that, they remind you of nothing less than their ancient relatives, dinosaurs, in this case a big predatory T-Rex.

The crow hopped from wall to wall on Longworth Street never taking its dead vision from me as though Hitchcock were directing it. A woman in her mid-thirties was walking the other way. “It’s following you,” she said with a strange smile, “is it your familiar?” She was dressed completely in black, like the crow. The only difference was she had platinum dyed hair and very black mascara.

The city was looking interesting in the late afternoon winter. It was half three, the light was failing and in the cold air every building seemed outlined in ink against the tarnished silver sky. Yet it was getting a bit scary down on Longworth Street. I swear that as soon as the woman spoke the crow gave her look, bobbed its head, and flapped away arrogantly. I was left alone with my fish and a slight chill down my spine.

Hey, stop staring at my haddock

Writing the time as half three, reminds me of something. I had a typical Northern European misunderstanding on the weekend. I was conducting tours of Chetham’s Library at 1.30pm and 3pm. There were a couple of Norwegians on the first tour who’d arrived a little early. They’d arrived at 12.30pm. This was because they’d rung me in the morning and asked me when the tour was starting. Half one I’d said. In many Northern European countries people think half one is half twelve, an hour earlier, in other words half the hour. In our island logic it clearly can only mean a half hour after the hour.

The Nordic guests were still delighted to come on the tour of these almost 600-year-old buildings: as were an American woman and her daughter who were looking up universities in the UK. The daughter wants to do a Masters in building conservation over here. When Michael Powell, the librarian, revealed letters from the Heywood collection signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they shook their heads in astonishment.

The 3pm group loved the buildings too. As Michael, with his trademark sardonic delivery, was entertaining the guests while showing them remarkable materials such as a medieval bible in manuscript from the 1300s and the utterly lovely first edition of Saxtons’ Atlas of England and Wales from 1579, one woman noticed something about her friend. She thought he looked like the founder of Chetham’s School and Library, Humphrey Chetham, so she got him to pose behind Michael’s back and took the picture. “It’s the nose and the eyes,” she said later. David, as her friend was called, seemed happy to go along with the description. He was Humphrey for a day.

All David needs is a the right hat and he'd be a perfect seventeenth century benefactor

This reminded me of the time when I was taking a large group around Manchester Art Gallery and we stopped in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. As I was talking I saw four people detach themselves and walk to a Holman Hunt picture. This was The Shadow of Death and features Christ with his arms raised in a Y-shape. It depicts him in his pre-Messiah days when he had a proper job and he’s stretching after sawing wood in his carpenter’s shop, ominously in the Hunt painting, his shadow on the wall behind is reminiscent of the crucifixion.​The wandering four from my group split. One took a picture, while, with Christ’s Y as the first letter, the other three made the MCA of the Village People’s disco blast. It was hilarious - if irreverent.

'Young man, there's no need to feel down/ I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground'

On that second Chetham’s tour were a father and daughter from Perth, Australia. They have relatives in Hartlepool and had seen Chetham’s Library on an Australian travel programme. Robert had called me in the morning to see if there were any spare tickets. There weren’t, but he seemed desperate to come along and when he said he wanted to drive from Hartlepool to Manchester and back for the tour in a day, I had to say yes.

The English (rather than perhaps the Scots’) sense of distance isn’t long. Two hours in each direction is perhaps the upper limit for most. When I grew up in Rochdale I never went out in Bury, all of six miles distant. Then again there wasn’t much there that Rochdale didn’t have aside from a better fish market and no teenager goes six miles for fish. Even when the crows leave you alone.​Robert’s daughter is studying at a Sydney university. Previously she’d stayed with friends on that side of the country but way outside Sydney and she said: “We’d drive six hours each way to get some city life.” I guided a journalist from Colorado once and he lived two hours from the nearest shop. I like to live two minutes from the nearest shop. And bar. With a national park and the Pennines within ten to fifteen miles. Convenience is so convenient.

Traffic grinds to a halt again in Manchester

Mind you, thinking of the Aussies, given the state of congestion on Manchester roads at present, it takes six hours to get two miles to The Quays, at rush hour. Something like that. Suffice to say that instead of the projected Sat-Nav time of two hours and forty minutes to get to Manchester from Hartlepool it had taken Robert and his daughter an hour longer.

The Chetham’s tours were the last of the year and so Sue McLoughlin, the heritage manager, and her granddaughter Imogen, provided mince pies and mulled wine. It was all very jolly.

By the way the best question of the week I couldn’t answer came in the Audit Room of Chetham’s. I was talking about John Dee, the enchanter, mathematician and the Warden of Manchester from 1595 to 1605, at the end of his long and slightly preposterous life. Dee was probably the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Before Manchester he had been in what is now Germany attempting alchemy, in other words making gold from base metals, the impossible dream of so many dreamers through the ages. He was spying for England too and, by sheer coincidence, through his obsession with symbols, gave himself the code number of 007.

I said something like this to the group, “Ian Fleming who created the James Bond’s MI6 character didn’t know Dee had done this. The inspiration for Fleming’s 007 seems to have come from the number assigned to a code breakthrough for naval intelligence in World War II.”

The a voice came from across the room. “There’s MI5 and MI6, but what happened to MI1/2/3 and 4?”​I had no idea. I have no idea. Next time I see that crow I’ll ask it.

John Dee, 007, as he would have looked in Manchester. Give that man the Best Dressed Magician Award, 1595, right now.

You can buy gift vouchers for my tours here.You can buy my uodated and massively expanded guidebook to Manchester here.

Haunted Underworld guests posing with me. Tina, the screamer, is on the right

THE DUCK, a female mallard, chased the male mistle thrush, stopped and then the thrush walked towards the duck. It looked very much like cross-species bird flirting. It also looked ridiculous given how much bigger the duck was than the thrush, three times bigger at least.

That this avian courtship was taking in place in front of group on an April Fool’s Day tour made it all the more delicious. The whole event was mad, with me delivering twenty five crazy Manchester stories and guests having to guess up to five false ones. We finished in the Town Hall Tavern where the group were tasked with singing Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger to the tune of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows.

The false story, I only did one I included in the end, concerned a carving of rabbits in the Cathedral, called Rabbits Cooking The Hunter.

This is was the fib and what I said: ‘Elmer Fudd was right in his unceasing quest to kill Bigs Bunny. Rabbit should be pronounced 'wabbit'. We've just been talking about Samuel Johnson's 1750’s dictionary in Chetham’s Library. Well another of the books reveals something else. And it seems that for certain 'r' animal words the original pronunciation was 'w', this comes from a twist in the sounds handed down from the Germanic into Anglo-Saxon and which was continued in use by peasants. Thus in the 1300s it might not have been unusual for a peasant to have said: 'The wabbit and the wobin are worried by the wat.' This only applied to animal words. So, Elmer Fudd was right. Rabbit should be said 'wabbit'. Easter bunnies, Easter wabbits.’​I’m pleased only two of the teams on the tour guessed this was the false story.

The wabbits cooking the hunter

The group on the Salford tour

The day before the above tour I’d taken a full house of guests along Chapel Street in Salford,on a tour jointly organised with Salford City Council. This route is remarkably rich in colourful detail and national significance. In less than a mile it captures the essence of these central areas of the conurbation. We went inside Sacred Trinity church and St Philip’s church, both of whom supplied a splendid welcome, as is the way in these modern, progressive places of worship. A big, big thanks to Kolyn and Alice respectively in Sacred Trinity and St Philip's. (And for that matter, a big thanks to Shelagh McNerney, Head of Development, Salford City Council, and her team for facilitating the tour.)

In St Philip’s we went into the atmospheric crypt and saw the walled up grave of one of the most important military figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Arbuthnot, fought in the Napoleanic Wars from Spain to the West Indies. He was the North and Midlands of England military commander during the tumultuous 1840s, a time of great distress and Chartist unrest. He, apparently, carried out his role with great sensitivity.​His house was on the Crescent close to St Philips. He died without children, his wife having died many years before. Arbuthnot’s funeral in 1849 was a huge affair packed with military pomp and attracting thousands of bystanders. His simple wooden coffin can be glimpsed through ventilation holes in the crypt. We finished the tour by singing Ewan MacColl’s hymn to the gritty reality of Salford seventy year’s ago, Dirty Old Town. It was sung with relish by the guests.

The crypt under St Philip's church

Speaking of gritty, on one of the Mayfield tours recently a gentleman told me how his teacher during the 1960s had referred to Manchester’s three rivers, the Irwell, Irk and Medlock as the Inkwell, Mirk and Mudlark due to their extreme pollution at the time. Now there are brown trout back – as this video shows which I filmed with the Environmental Agency a few years back. ​I loved another story on a recent Mayfield tour. Up on the platform level there’s a rusting piece of kit. Its official title is British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment. The acronym used by rail workers and managers was BRUTE. One guest on a snowy tour recalled how his mother was once taken aback in Victoria Station by a warning sign which used the acronym but failed to define what it meant. The sign read, ‘Please be careful of BRUTES on the platforms.’ Wise words.

An upended Brute

I mentioned an old department store on Stretford Road, called Paulden’s’, on a Principal Hotel tour recently. One lady remembered working at the Refuge Assurance, as the Principal Hotel was formerly, when a dramatic fire in 1957 destroyed the department store. Everybody was upset about the loss of this Manchester landmark apart from, “lots of people in Hulme, as all the records of their hire purchase payments had gone up in smoke with the fire.”

The Haunted Underworld tour on Sunday was great fun. Thanks must be extended to Tina Miller for her screams at the climax of a couple of stories in the dark. Screamers on ghost tours spread a fabulous mood of tension amongst guests, which is a fine quality in a spooky, dark, underground location. In fact, I might hire Tina to seed fear in the dark.

All the Haunted Underworld group line-up at the end of the tour

Finally, it was a great pleasure to chat with James Naughtie of BBC Radio 4 about Manchester at the time of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. We were in Chetham's Library looking at the Manchester Mercury newspaper from 17 August 1819, the day after Peterloo. The shows highlighting particular days in British history through the filter of front pages of newspapers will be broadcast in May and June. It seems from the picture below that Mr Naughtie was offering me lessons in how to play the invisible piano. Probably the best piano for me to play as long as its inaudible as well as invisible.

THE Mayfield Partnership masterplan delivers a dynamic and exciting vision for the city.

Of course I might say this given I am presently conducting tours (click here) across the site, but as a city centre commentator I believe I am justified - objectively - in making the claim.

The masterplan designers are Studio Egret West, they should be congratulated for the coherence of the plan given its vast 24 acre extent. If you are familiar with Manchester then 24 acres is an area slightly larger than that bordered by John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Exchange Square and Deansgate.

The plan integrates progressive design with heritage assets to spectacular effect and includes a 6.5 acre linear park along the River Medlock plus the opening out of the huge Mayfield Depot from 1910 in a sensible and attractive manner.​It’s the imagination here that captivates. There’s almost a childlike exuberance. I remember as a kid being asked to create a fantasy city. The Mayfield plans look like the place I drew, aside from the lack of a rocket ship docking area. Look at the pictures and you might catch a flavour of what I mean.

The masterplan sweeps from very tall landmark buildings on the west and north of up to 50 storeys to more tall buildings on the east, but in the form of an inverted bow. This dips in the centre over the park. The southern side will be occupied by low rise buildings. This inverted bow ensures the sun will easily illuminate the new park unlike many recent schemes with central garden or park areas.

At Mayfield it’s proposed the tall buildings on the west and north, will be more suitable for office and commercial space while those on the south and east will be residential. This is a general principle only as it might be appropriate for the landmark building over the former ticket office of Mayfield Station to become a hotel or flats or a combination of both.

Mayfield Park will offer a range of amenities and a variety of landscaped spaces to encourage different uses and different users, from infants to pensioners, from residents to visitors. There will be formal garden areas and wilder parts with the River Irk the focus as it meanders across the site freed from its fierce nineteenth century walls. The higher level of the old depot building will require terraces down to the river which should introduce pleasing height differences in the park

The key ‘heritage asset’ is the old Mayfield Station and this will provide the foundation for tall buildings on the north while also leaving room at the platform level for a garden embedded in one of the old track bays.

The huge interior of depot, almost the size of two football pitches, will be opened out and provide a range of opportunities. In this masterplan it’s suggested the interior might be used as exhibition or gig space, bars, restaurants and maybe some retail. There will be public route through the interior from the former ticket office area opening out into a broad gantry walkway over the steps and terraces down to the lower area of the park on the south side of the river.

It’s envisaged to deliver the plan in phases with the first phase being Mayfield Park and the residential units on the east of the site. Then it will be the depot’s turn, with other elements across the large site following on.​It all looks wonderful.

Let’s hope the ambition contained within the masterplan can be retained and delivered as time marches one. The only problem is that this is a ten year plan and given the quality and flair shown in these proposals it’s natural to feel impatient. What will happen though is that the charming name of Mayfield, which harks back to the days when there was a large house here in beautiful gardens, will once more become relevant as the park blossoms.

'The Mayfield Partnership has set out a proposed vision for #MayfieldMCR, which will evolve over the coming months, with your input. Come along to one of the public consultation events around the city and give your feedback: www.mayfieldmanchester.co.uk/consultation #MayfieldConsultation'

CONSULTATION DATES:

Mayfield public consultation at Piccadilly Gardens - March 3, 9am-5pm.

'Take the opportunity to learn more about the proposed 6.5 acre park, and participate in family-friendly activities, from building cardboard box worlds and sandpit landscapes, to mapping out ideas on sensory tables.'

TWO crazy and fruity stories from a Manchester hotel manager the other day. ​My friend had been called by the PA of a company that uses the hotel frequently and asked if a visiting company director could be ‘looked after’. This means an upgraded bedroom, a free bottle of bubbly or wine and maybe some chocolates. A couple of days after the visit, the manager was called back by the PA and said, “What did you think I meant by ‘looked after’? I didn’t mean send an escort to his room.”

Apparently the director had gone for a jog in the morning and returned to the room. Just as he was about to shower there was a knock on the door, so still in his jogging shorts he answered. There was a beautiful young woman outside who pushed her way in, kissed him passionately on the lips and moved towards the bedroom. “No, no, please no,” stuttered the man and ushered the surprised woman out.

After calming the PA of the company down, assuring her that the hotel would never send a prostitute to a guest’s room, the manager checked the CCTV. He saw the escort enter the room and quickly leave whereupon, clearly confused, she checked her phone, shook her head and walked round a couple of corners, knocked on another door and this time didn’t come out for a while. What had happened was she’d originally gone to room 412 when she should have gone to 421. Not good with figures in this sense of the word.​He had an even more disturbing story. A maid one day came down from one of the rooms and said, “There’s a body in room 238.” The manager took a concierge to investigate and there in the darkened bedroom there was a prone figure. “You open the curtains and I’ll call the emergency services,” said the manager. When the curtains were opened the body turned out to be a sex doll. This was removed to the office where a short time later a call was received. A male voice said, “I left something in room 238.” “We know you did,” said the manager, “lots of people leave things like gloves and hats but not what you left.” “I wouldn’t have left her but we’d had an argument,” said the man about an inanimate plastic doll. “May I come and get her?” “Of course,” said the, by now, bewildered and bemused manager, “but I advise you don’t leave the doll in bedrooms for maids to find and think they are dead bodies.” “Right you are,” said the man as though he’d just had a conversation about buying teabags.​ *On a more savoury note had some fabulous fun with Belgian guests recently in Tatton Park as the snow fell. The picture below show several incentive tour buyers hosted by Visit Britain about to scoot through the deer park on all-terrain Segways. Ha, this was fun including a tremendous and dramatic fall I suffered when being too cocky on the way back to the start point. Proper head over heels as I tried to take a bank too sharply. The good news was that it was in full view of everyone. My how they laughed at me.

The Belgians took several pictures of the red deer sheltering in the park. With the snow falling it was pretty as picture. The day before we had gathered in Cloud 23 for a champagne reception, 23 floors up in the Hilton Hotel even though the guests and me were staying over the Midland Hotel. Good job we hadn't had the champagne before the Segwaying otherwise I might have tried to do a wheelie somersault on my machine.

On Friday last week I took artists and festival organisers on a Peterloo Massacre tour for a project for Manchester International Festival (MIF) next year, which will also be the 200th anniversary of Peterloo. Fabulous people seen in the top picture below. This is the best thing about a specialist tour. People are on the tour because they want to learn things and they want to talk about them. An energised audience is always the best.

Of course, it is the performer’s job (guides are performers and entertainers not academics although they need a bit of that too) to get the most from an audience, but there’s only so far one can go. Faced with a group of teenagers who have been told to come on a tour after maybe a four hour drive from Oxford where they had already been subjected to a morning tour simply isn’t easy. Similarly with a Malaysian group recently who didn’t really want a full coach tour, they just wanted to get to the Manchester United bit so they could take pictures and tick the visit-to-Britain box for stadia.

With the MIF group it was blast, loads of fun, lots of questions, lots of to-ing and fro-ing, despite the topic.

This Wednesday I conducted a tour for the Alliance Business School. It involved post-grads from China, the USA, the Czech Republic, Spain and Australia. I said, “It’s a shame you aren’t studying the weather because on this tour it’s going to throw itself at you in five different ways: rain, hail, snow, wind and sunshine.” Actually I was wrong we got sleet too.

A PSYCHIC medium called Lee came on my Chetham’s tour on Saturday. He’s a pleasant man, very gentle and gracious and had previously come on my Mayfield tour. I am naturally of a sceptical cast of mind but it’s always interesting listening to those who consider themselves in touch with ‘the other side’. Turns out he had three ‘experiences’ or ‘visions’ or ‘manifestations’ at Chetham’s – not sure of the right word.

By the main gate he saw a group of young boys seemingly at play. The costumes he described could have been those of the ‘poor boys’ admitted in the late 1600s. He thought these spirits were happy in themselves. Then in the Baronial Dining Room he saw a group of gentlemen from the early 1700s having a serious meeting but again nothing threatening.​However, in the Audit Room, which already has a hell mouth carving of a demon eating a sinner (see picture below) and a burn mark supposedly from Satan, he found himself standing next to a beautiful young woman from the nineteenth century in a striking red dress to which something terrible had happened. Oh dear.

This echoed Lee’s Mayfield tour experience. He’d ‘seen’ a dead man from 1968 walking up and down one of the platforms his soul stuck in time and lost up there. There was nothing troubling about him though. Meanwhile in one of the old parcel offices in the depot he sensed 'a very dark presence’ and that something awful had occurred which was hidden from him.

Now like I say I am of a sceptical mind but when you are alone in these ancient, on the one hand, and abandoned, on the other hand, places, you can’t help things playing on your mind. Why can’t all ghosts be happy ghosts, just hanging around because they so enjoyed it down here and can’t let go.

By the way the diesel pump in Mayfield is becoming a celebrity on the tours. It’s a seventies entity in vivid yellow with a Total tag for Total Oil. It’s a handsome devil too and in the quiet of the vast Mayfield depot, in my mind’s eye, I imagine it comes alive and hops around the depot when nobody is there. Matt Wilkinson, a photographer, came on the Sunday tour and took some marvellous images, including one of the diesel pump, below. I particularly like the picture at the top of this page too of the rows of iron pillars receding into the distance, like something from the Lord of the Rings..

It was my birthday on Saturday - 27 January. And that of Alice in Wonderland’s Lewis Carroll. Or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as he was called when he was born in Daresbury, 21 miles from Manchester in 1832. There’s some sort of connection in that. There’s something very ‘down the rabbit hole’ and ‘through the looking glass’ about my occupation of writing on lots of different things from food to architecture to politics, taking people into places they’ve never been and into places that may have been closed for decades, while writing on imagined or illusionary buildings and projects.​27 January is also a very sombre day as it marks the liberation of Auschwitz and is thus International Holocaust Day. I took the family to Auschwitz several years ago, everybody should visit. It never leaves you and nor should it. Alice and death camps. 27 January, it seems, is absurdity and horror. I suppose one way or another every day is, somewhere in this imperfect world. Not the most cheerful of thoughts but pertinent given what Holocaust Day represents.

​I initially wrote this in 2013 for Manchester Confidential when Paul Morley's book The North was released. The passages below (slightly amended) preceded an interview with Morley.

MAYBE we should all write down what our North is.

For me it’s a complex of positives and negatives which adds up to the only place I ever want to live. It fits me like a glove. Like an old sock. I know its ways, its bad habits and its peculiar joys.

At its best it’s the spirit of independence melded with cleverness and humour, at my end of the North that means Anthony Burgess, Robert Peel, John Bright, Lydia Becker, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Raffald, Joseph Brotherton, Sam Bamford, Joan Bakewell, Anthony Wilson, Lemn Sissay, hotpot, Lancashire cheese, steak and cow heel pie, curry, and pint after pint of golden ale.

​It's family.

It’s the Smiths, Doves and Mark E Smith. It’s Caroline Aherne and Steve Coogan and Les Dawson. It’s Chetham's Library, United, Liverpool, City, my home town of Rochdale, LCCC and the National Cycling Centre. MIF. It’s the 25 Nobel prize winners from Manchester University. It’s liberating. It's the Miners Community Arts & Music Centre and Small Cinema in Moston, creating something out of nothing with their bare hands. It's innovation, entrepreneurship and radicalism. It’s the Fifth Pan-African National Congress. It’s multi-cultural, yet it’s about a sense of identity.

But I know it’s also Bernard Manning and 8% of a low-turnout voting Nick Griffin as a Euro MP in 2008. It’s Shameless and people being somehow proud of that show, it’s the strange adulation of Bez, it’s a chip on the shoulder, a vehicle for condescension and it’s about understanding the anger that comes from that. It’s about the disaffection that led so many of our towns to vote Brexit. It’s the segregation within those towns between groups of different ethnicity as highlighted in the Panorama programme of 22 January about Blackburn. It can be reductive.

It’s moorland and wooded cloughs, disused mills, grand Town Halls, church spires and council estates, weavers cottages and millstone grit, it’s brick, it’s brash, it’s high meadows and crazy sunsets at the end of dull days.

It can be breath-takingly more beautiful than anywhere else in these British islands and fifteen miles away it can be irredeemably uglier than anywhere in these British islands.

It’s a mass extinction, revealed in massive masonry by the side of rivers, peeping from under greenery. A place where you guess a factory once reared high above, where hundreds of humans worked long hours in clog and shawl at a time when through the Royal Exchange in Manchester 6.6bn linear yards of cloth flowed with nearest rival Japan producing a paltry 56m linear yards.

It’s the spark that’s left the furnace.

It’s a sense that maybe the really important times are over. That every dog has its day and that we’ve had ours. It’s the hope that if we once had all that, then the North can rise again - and is rising led by the transformation of Liverpool and Manchester. It’s the doubt contained within this transformation that much of this new money wasn’t generated anywhere in the North.

It’s the almost hand-moulded hills of the Trough of Bowland, the sandstone and views of Alderley Edge, the sheer effortless beauty of the Lune Valley, the can-this-be-real drama and gentleness of the Lake District, the ludicrous sand dunes at Formby.

It’s the empty urban areas of east and north Manchester, the shattered districts of inner Liverpool, demoralised small towns such as Radcliffe and Widnes. It’s boarded up pubs and shops and worse, the hundreds of cut off, isolated, estates such as Langley or Hattersley or Kirkby that make me seethe with rage about the inhuman planning disaster of post World War II Britain – that internal diaspora played out with more brutal potency in the heavily populated North than just about anywhere.

It’s the endless transition between well-to-do and poor, between haves and have nots, between wilderness and towns.

It’s the place where you see the skull beneath the British skin more obviously than anywhere else. The North is the rough with the smooth. It’s where, as Jim McClellan wrote, ‘the social processes are more visible’.

Yet the North is all about the people who’ve achieved, not through privilege and inheritance, but through ‘nous’ - although I know I may be kidding myself.

And losing steam.

And repeating myself.

Because of course when I talk about the North I’m only really ever talking about the North West, my bit.

​2017 ended and 2018 began with public tours on the Discover Manchester programme. This is where a group of guides under the heading Manchester Guided Tours have teamed up to provide tours everyday at 11am: that’s every day including Christmas Day. They’re excellent value, under £10, and the tours provide a general introduction to Manchester rather than being themed on a specific subject.

For the guide it’s a voyage of discovery too, as you have no idea who might turn up and where they might come from. The two small groups I picked up from the 11am rendezvous location outside Central Library before and after New Year, included people from Germany, Canada, Belgium, USA, China, as well as closer to home in Preston, Prestwich, Stockport and Manchester.

For these tours my usual route is St Peter’s Square, Central Library, Town Hall Extension, Albert Square, St Ann’s Church, Royal Exchange with a finish at the Cathedral, or at the rear of the latter, at the National Football Museum. This route hits several prominent city centre buildings while also covering a richness of history that no other provincial city can compete with in the UK. Yeah, I know, that’s a bold statement, but I stand by it. Come on the tour and you’ll understand why. It’s also a route that takes guests inside a lot of buildings, which as well as providing occasionally welcome shelter, provides a more comprehensive tour than simply keeping on the streets.

On 2 January there were two guests from Lubbock, Texas. One of this pair lives in Cologne for the time being and was showing his friend some other parts of Europe with a non-traditional itinerary of Dublin, Manchester, Antwerp and then back to Cologne. “What’s Lubbock, Texas, like?” I asked. “It’s got the Buddy Holly museum, is in a cotton growing area, is very flat, has a quarter of a million inhabitants but it’s four hours from the nearest major city,” said one of the friends. “You could describe it as the most disappointing city in the USA,” said his pal with a grin. “Wow,” I said, “they should market it that way, people flock to places with a point of exception. The city authorities could have a campaign called ‘Lubbock, it always disappoints.’”

Strangely enough this observation from citizens of the city made me want to go to Lubbock. Places that seem dour to the natives often have something worthwhile to experience for visitors. Part of the paradox of tourism is that residents feel contempt for qualities visitors find fascinating. Not that I'm a big Buddy Holly fan.

My last tour of 2017 had included an extremely dapper gentleman with a bow tie. When I'd asked the guests where they hailed from, our dandy self-described as an Indian Italian Scouser working at Manchester Royal Infirmary. I said not only are you the first Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met but you’re the best dressed Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met. The two Canadians on the group were visiting because the male half of the couple was a football fanatic who supports Everton Football Club passionately through a family connection. He was here to visit the National Football Museum and the two Manchester clubs before attending a game at Goodison Park in Liverpool.

Couple of final points.

The best thing I overheard in a Manchester pub over the New Year was while waiting at a bar, and a man said to his lady, “I look on life as a comedy which is my tragedy, you look on life as a tragedy which is your tragedy.” It sounded Wildean and profound, although I’m not sure it is profound at all. I'm still trying to sort out its meaning but it had fine ring to it.

Meanwhile there was a pleasant tweet from Allied London about the long derelict London Road Fire Station. This was posted on New Year’s Eve. It read '2017: Planning Permission obtained, a year of historic tours with @JonathSchofield and a special collaboration with @wallpapermag#WallpaperComposed - featuring a enchanting performance from @JescaHoop here's to an historic 2018 #HouseOfLondonRoad.'

​Truly, taking those tours around that venerable space incorporating the living memories of people who had lived and worked, there were some of my favourite moments of the past two years.

So in a few days I will have completed my first of sixteen walks for Manchester International Festival. These sold out second quickest after Bjork apparently. That's 480 people I'll be taking around.

It just shows that publicity is everything. The brochure and website of this incredibly well-regarded festival has worked its magic on my tours. I can't wait to start. There will be a few surprises for people but then on a tour called Rabbit holes, Radicals and Pioneers, there'd have to be.

A curious incident happened on a Haunted Underworld tour. There was one young woman who from beginning to end had her fingers in her ears and her eyes tight shut and was being guided round by her friend.

When the terrors of the underground had been negotiated and the screams had faded I asked the woman whether she'd enjoyed it.

"Yes," she said in the fresh air above ground, "tremendously."

"But you didn't see any of it or hear any of it?" I said.

"I know I was too frightened to look but I still thought it was brilliant," she said.

Saturday 7 March 2015 and I had two tours, a full to bursting Haunted Underworld tour and a more modestly proportioned Tour of Uninteresting Objects. The backdrop was less delightful. A small number – maybe 300 or so – EDL were bothering the city centre. The tiny, ridiculous yet noisy EDL - the so-called English Defence League; not my England, not my defence league so how dare they adopt England’s name. There were police everywhere, fences to corral them and a helicopter overhead. Mostly the EDL seemed interested in occupying Walkabout sports bar and drinking gassy alcohol based on Continental lagers. As a tour guide the main practical problem was the helicopter. Jeez those things are hard to project over even with a foghorn for a voice - as I'm proud to possess. The two groups were very diverse, the EDL would have hated them. The Haunted Underworld tour included people from across Manchester but also Aberdeen, the Isle of Man, Romania, Spain and Turkey. The two Spaniards, both women, had settled in Manchester and were respectively an architect and a civil engineer. They were skilled workers doing their bit, enjoying life in Manchester, although they felt Manchester was needlessly demolishing old buildings. This confused me a little as this isn’t happening so much at present. Century House was the one the Spaniards mentioned but we disagreed about this, after all the adjacent buildings were pigsties, the worst of the eighties. Still the council and the planning department does have to be closely monitored over its ideas about the city centre, it needs to be watched with a beady eye in case expedience is allowed to destroy heritage. Latest sketchy plans for the area between Bootle Street and Jackson’s Row appear to not include the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub, a two hundred and some year old pub, one of two surviving structures from the time of the Peterloo Massacre in the location where it happened.

The EDL meatheads were bothersome on the second tour. There was an anxious moment as a group, or to use the correct collective noun for EDL a lump, of them loped past the tour party at St John’s Gardens. It was a curious day all round for the Tour of Uninteresting Objects. As I talked close to the Commercial Hotel on Liverpool Road, one of the oldest, and probably the very oldest, railway hotel in the world, a drinker, about eight pints in, came over the road to listen. He swayed slightly and squinted a bit but didn’t interrupt. He fell off the kerb at one point. Maybe it was my delivery.

There was a Chilean couple on the tour with a baby. The man worked at the University I think, or it may have been the hospital, the woman was studying at the University, and they’d been here eighteen months.

“We love Manchester,” the woman had said.

“There's so much to do, it’s a great city to live in,” the man said.

“Our little girl,” said the woman looking down at the baby strapped to her chest, ”was born here. I’m so proud to say she is a Mancunian.”

It was said with such evident pride it made me smile and wonder. Here were recent immigrants who had a clear sense of identity already. Here were two ‘foreigners’ settled in Manchester with a young native in their arms who will share two cultures as she grows.

Meanwhile the streets of the city had been bothered by ‘natives’ of my Britain, people who seem lost and marooned, who seem stuck out-of-time, impotent. The EDL men and women (mainly men) I saw seemed blind to the advantages and opportunities an open and pluralistic society offers them. They’ve turned inwards, turned ‘the other’ into a problem and in the process turned themselves into a greater problem.

The urbane Chileans and Spaniards on my tours appeared to embody what I would consider my British values better than would-be nationalists of my own country. In limited numbers fortunately the EDL moved through Manchester’s Saturday streets, trapped in narrow hatreds, their faces angry, their hands balled in fists, just a mere misplaced stare away from violence.

But they were a hornet on a buffalo's back. An irritant, a distraction. They and that helicopter. Manchester's city centre is back to normal now as colourful and diverse as ever.

Happy Hungarians

I did a public speaking engagement in Fumo Restaurant recently. I was sat opposite two fine Hungarian chaps who were attending a conference in the city.

One was a huge Manchester United fan. There were three hotels that delegates were staying in and as fate would have it he'd been allocated Hotel Football - the new hotel opposite Old Trafford stadium owned my past Manchester United stars such as Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville.

"Do you want a Quays or a Stadium view?" the receptionist had asked when he'd checked in. In his charming accent and imaginative English our lovely visitor said, "I couldn't bloody believe my lucky stars, I fell to my knees and thanked God for this privilege, and shouted so very loudly, "You are an Angel sent from Heaven, please the Stadium view!" I leave the curtains open so the big red neon sign of Manchester United can sleep with me."

IT was late 2001.He looked like some sort of cleverly put together puppet of a softly spoken young middle-class southern lad. In fact he was probably described in ‘the counties’, as upper-middle class, a nuance which is impossible in the North of England.He was called Damian, I think, and was impeccably neat with a slight frame and a voice that seemed trained from the cot for Radio 4.“What’s your idea?” I said.“I’m concerned about the demise of Polynesian peoples on low-lying islands,” he said enunciating every syllable.“Should global warming involve an increase in sea levels then whole cultures may disappear,” he said with the look of a man riven by personal tragedy.“Sounds serious,” I said. “So where will you go?”“I’m going to the island of Fukayu-up. I’m going to record the experiences and lives of the women – the mothers - and how they are facing the possible extinction of their society. And you? I can tell you have a North Country accent.”North Country? Bless him, the decayed description of a retired vicar in a Jane Austen novel. (By the way I may have made up that island name).But I had to admire his cunning. Dying cultures – good one, ticked lots of boxes. I’d have to watch Damian.You see, we were at war.We were the last men standing in Radio 4’s ‘Journey of a Lifetime’ competition. Several thousand people had entered the annual comp giving details of why their dream journey should be selected.The prize for the sole winner was a fully financed BBC trip to their destination. On return home, weather-worn and heroic, their travellers tales would be broadcast on Radio 4.After two interviews already, in the home of co-sponsors the Royal Geographical Society close to Hyde Park, it had come down to this, me and Damian. There was no second prize.“I want to go to Manchester.” My rival looked puzzled.“ I have an old Times Atlas of the World,” I said. “One day I found tucked away in the Bolivian rainforest, on an Amazon tributary, another Manchester. It’s the oddest, most inaccessible British city namesake in the world. The nearest road appears to be at least two hundred miles away, the only access is down a river called Rio Manuripi. I want to find out why it’s there and if the place still exists. The last record seems to be a decades old Bolivian airforce survey.”He was getting it now.“And of course, next year there’s the Commonwealth Games in Manchester , and that fits as well,” he said. “Are you going at this from an ecological angle or an anthropological one?”“Neither. Timing's perfect with the Commonwealth Games and it should be a lot of fun,” I said. “I’ll take United and City footy shirts, bottles of Vimto and gallons of Holt’s beer. Me and the villagers will have a great time. Just getting there will make great radio.”The panel consisted of Richard Bannerman, Editor of Documentaries at the BBC, a man I forget from the Royal Geographic Society, and Benedict Allen, the broadcaster and explorer who had an accent that made Damian’s look common.When it was my turn I gave everything. I sold my dream hard. I described how I would deliver pure, bloody, broadcast magic to drip mellifluously into the ear of the charmed Radio 4 listener.Then towards the end, on the spur of the moment, I came up with an idea. On my return I would aim to organise an exhibition in a museum in Manchester with the photographs and memorabilia I’d taken. Good one, I thought to myself.After the interview, Damian and I sat around awkwardly for a while, until I was called back in.“Is your time frame of three weeks long enough?” the panel asked. “Have you fully understood the perils of rainforest travel, the disorientation, the loneliness, the potential health hazards and wildlife dangers? Do you know what equipment will be needed?”“I've already bought a hat,” I said weakly. "With a little mosquito net."“Damian’s got it,” they said.He went to his atoll. On radio he delivered a sober account of life on the low reef, although he didn’t seem to be concentrating on the women anymore, the cheat.I got a couple of letters after the interview. One was from Bannerman saying ‘sorry’ but ‘the nature of your journey made it the more unpredictable of the two ideas’. Benedict Allen wrote to say he’d been rooting for me and hinted he'd been outvoted. He’d loved the exploring for exploring sake and doing it for fun – don’t give up on it, he wrote.